The invention relates to a method of testing and installing a remote control unit for controlling elements of a home automation network intended for managing security or heat or light comfort in a building. It also relates to a data medium comprising software for implementing such a method.
In home automation installations, it is normal for a set of remote control units to use radiofrequency communication to transmit control commands to actuators or receive status information from actuators in a building.
Such actuators are intended to, for example, move mobile closing equipment, such as doors, gates, roller blinds, locks, solar protection, such as blinds or filtering screens, move ventilation equipment such as cooling flaps, or move multimedia projection equipment (projection screens). The actuators can also act on heating, air conditioning, ventilation or lighting devices.
The actuators and remote control units also communicate by radiofrequencies with sensors measuring physical quantities such as temperature, humidity, wind speed, lighting, luminance, etc., likely to affect the comfort or energy consumption of the building.
The radiofrequency communication of most of the elements (actuators, sensors, remote control units) of the installation is two-way, but some elements communicate only one-way.
All the elements of the installation have a common identification means which enables them to know that they belong to one and the same installation, and disregard radiofrequency signals that are not intended for them. This identification means is, for example, a “house key” which comprises a seed duplicated in a computation algorithm used during authentication processes.
The elements of the installation also contain in memory the list of the elements that they control, or, conversely, the list of the elements that they obey to, or even the list of the elements from which they receive measurement information.
Introducing a new remote control unit into the installation means making said unit known to all the equipment it will control and/or conversely acquiring a list of the latter. This configuration operation can be more or less tedious to carry out.